Notes of the End
by Arsenical
Summary: A diary-like chronicle of the outbreak in the very heart of the Philippines.
1. How Everything Began

Nobody ever saw it coming. Everybody thought it was just sci-fi jargon until it wasn't. We didn't know how it started, it just happened. All the books, all the movies, all the conspiracy theorists were right all along.

The first time I saw it was on a Sunday. I hadn't celebrated Mass in months. The priest walked up the aisle, as was how the Mass is started, and everybody at Church saw his bleeding left hand. Somebody in the crowd shouted "the blood of Christ!" as the priest raised the cup with the wine. After that everything was out of control. People were clamouring for the altar to drink the "blood of Christ". This was a bloody Catholic mass, who better for the blood to come from than from a Catholic priest?

I don't even know why I didn't drink the blood. I always thought to myself there would have been a _rational_ reason for why the priest was bleeding out, even if the wound was already bandaged up. Here I was, a disillusioned Catholic in a crowd of nearly a thousand people, all of them going crazy, all of them continually asking the priest to put his hand over their bottles of water or their glasses or over their mouths, even. The priest was reluctant, but even he couldn't control the frenzied crowd.

There were only a handful of us who didn't go over to drink the blood, but I think I was the only one to just run away from Mass. I had to go somewhere after the Mass, so I thought they wouldn't mind if I got out a little early.

I just couldn't believe that _that_ was the blood of Christ himself. It was too good to be true. Sadly for me and for everyone else, that was the end of everything.

I woke up tired and still dressed in my attire from the night before. I heard a car crash, random shooting, and people screaming in pain. Looking out my window, I couldn't understand what was happening. This was Metro Manila; it's considered a normal part of life to hear these things – but not in the upper-class, gated communities like the one I lived in.

What got me outside of my house was when my neighbour drove his car straight into my front yard, causing serious damage to my garage door. I remember bursting out of my front door, screaming at the top of my lungs.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" I screamed as he got out of his car, wearing his nightclothes and brandishing a bloody left hand. I remember feeling that the wound looked eerily familiar, as though I'd seen it before. Right there it hit me: whatever injured the priest from last night probably also injured him.

"You've got to help me," my neighbour said, breathless, still trying to stop the bleeding from his arm, "my maid is insane! She tried to bite me! I knew it was a bad idea to hire a Catholic maid, they've all been brainwashed!"

"'Brainwashed?'", I repeated.

"That's right, brainwashed! You and all your Catholic people are out of your minds! Everyone who went to that stupid priest's Mass last night, all of them are going crazy. Trying to bite people and all that! I heard Julie from next door had her leg ripped off by her own husband! And _he_ went to your house of demon-worship last night, too!"

"All of those who are trying to bite people, they all came from Mass last night?" I asked, still confused.

"YES! That's what I've been trying to tell you, you idiot," he shouted at me. "You'd think you'd have brains for being a millionaire at 22! Moron, read my lips: my-maid-tried-to-bite-my-hand-off." His face was losing colour, his hand was still bleeding.

I shrugged off the insult and told him to help me push his car off my garage door to clear the driveway. I had no idea how I was able to comprehend the situation, but all I wanted to do now was to get out of the area.

I got my car out of my garage after I pried open the door with a crowbar (I don't even remember owning a crowbar) and he entered the passenger seat, his hand bleeding all over the seat.

"Have you got money?" I asked him as I suddenly felt my wallet in my back pocket and my cell phone in my front pocket.

"Yeah, I grabbed my wallet and phone as I ran out of the house-"

"And rammed my freaking garage door," I said, starting to flare up at the fact that he destroyed my garage door.

This led to an argument that I don't remember the words to. The next thing I remember is dropping him off at the hospital, where there were literally hundreds of people, many of them sporting the same bleeding wounds all over their body. I remember one man getting out of his car with a bleeding crotch.

I left my neighbour there and went back to my house, pondering over how to clean my blood-soaked passenger seat. If I knew then what I knew now I would have brought along the crowbar and drove as far away from the city as I could.

I didn't bother dressing up when I poured myself a cup of coffee and turned on the TV to the sounds of static. I didn't bother to turn off the TV when I fell asleep on my chair in the living room.

I remember waking up to the sounds of banging on my door. Looking out my window I saw my neighbour, Susana. I immediately opened the door; she nearly tripped herself coming in.

"Close the door, hurry!" she said. I did as told, locking us in. Then I stared in confusion as she began to push my chair onto the door.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"There were three people out there on the street eating my dog raw – _RAW_. I was just standing there as one of them tore off his leg and just chewed on it. I yelled at them to stop, then they all looked at me, all of them were filled with blood. One of them had this big knife sticking out of his chest. They started moaning, their arms were raised and they just started shuffling towards me. It was like they were doing the _Thriller_, I had no idea what was wrong with them. I just ran."

I remember staring at her. Her hazel eyes seemed to glow with fear. I don't know what got into me that I just believed her. She looked outside my window, and then she jumped back, screaming in fear. I looked out, and saw three bloodied people shambling towards us. One of them was sporting a butcher's knife stuck to their chest; the wound where the knife was wasn't bleeding out at all.

So there I was: with Susana, not knowing what the hell we were going to do in a house that was not built to withstand break-in. I remember that back then I still believed that they only became sick because of drinking the priest's blood, that they were still alive – even though the huge knife sticking out of that guy's chest would say otherwise. I did, however, believe that I did _not_ want to get bitten by any of them.

Here I am now, chronicling these down in whatever piece of paper I can find, to be read by nobody. Maybe when everything returns to normal I'll be able to put these together and make a book, like that girl who wrote a diary.

Maybe Susana and I would have had a better chance if I knew then what I knew now.


	2. The First Encounter

I was never a firm believer in the supernatural, but given recent circumstances I – and many other people – have been forced to reconsider everything that I've been brought up to believe. What if vampires, fairies and other creatures thought to be mythical also exist? If the dead are able to return and eat the flesh of the living for breakfast, who's to say there aren't also beings who's skin burns (or sparkles) when exposed to sunlight, has no reflection and drinks blood to sustain themselves?

I never believed in coincidence, believing instead that a chain of events led to one event happening, so it may have been a chain of events that led to my survival on the day of my first encounter with the "supernatural".

"What are we going to do?" I asked Susana as we looked out the window, seeing the three men slowly shuffling their way towards my doorstep.

"Help me move the furniture," she said, successfully being able to drag my coffee table.

"What? Why?" I asked dumbly.

"Barricade the door!"

"Barricade the door, right." I did as ordered, moving my chairs and couches towards the door.

After a few minutes of shuffling around my front yard, they finally reached my door, banging wildly. One of them seemed to be banging the wall instead of the door, which made me rethink the intelligence of one of my neighbours. I still look back on this moment, not understanding why I didn't figure out immediately that these things knew no intelligence but to constantly attack anything that still had a beating heart.

I got out my phone and attempted to call the police, and when that didn't work I tried to call the _barangay_, also nothing.

"Lines are busy. Do you want to call anyone?" I don't know what was going through my mind thinking about that when there were three people attempting to break down my door. Nonetheless, she said no and I put the phone back in my pocket. I didn't know what I was going to do. I stood there looking like an idiot while she ran through my stuff. "What are you looking for?"

"A weapon, anything we can use to keep them away. Do you have a gun? Anything we can use at all," she asked, going through my drawers.

"Yeah, actually, I do," I answered.

"Well go get it!"

I ran upstairs into my room, and searching through my desk drawers I found it: a dusty old Browning I bought for self-defence, never believing that I would use it.

I ran back downstairs, showing her the gun. We stood there for a full five seconds staring at it, not knowing what to do.

"Well?" she asked, looking back-and-forth between me and the gun in my hand.

"Well what?" I asked, totally confused about what she expected me to do with my gun – I didn't even know why I followed her order to get my gun in the first place.

"What do you expect to do with a gun? Throw it at them? They're trying to break into your home!"

"Yeah, I can see that. So?"

"So? _So?_ This means you have the legal right to defend yourself! Shoot them!"

"Well, they technically haven't broken into my home yet," I said, still trying to avoid using the pistol and pointing out that they're still outside while we are still safe inside.

"You want to wait for them to break down your door?"

"Well unless you can see through wood then I suggest opening the door."

"Why do I have to do it?" asked Susana. As I was about to answer I dropped the gun, it let off a loud bang as the bullet flew through my TV screen.

The look Susana gave me was almost comedic, given the seriousness of our situation. "Have you even used the gun before?"

"Of course… like, once or twice. I needed to use it to get a license to own it," I answered, trying to be apologetic about how I treated the gun. "Have _you_ used a gun?"

"Yeah," she answered, before I could ask her when she continued talking. "You wouldn't want to know when and why, give it to me. You open the door."

I gave her the gun, after which I found out that she was telling the truth by the way she handled it. Her form made her look like she's been using guns for ages.

"Open the door!"

After removing the furniture from the door and making sure to avoid the windows (I have no idea how I thought of avoiding the windows), I opened the door and immediately ran back to Susana.

"Sir, if you don't turn around now I will be forced to shoot you," she said, aiming the gun at the first one to enter the door. "Sir, please don't come any closer. I _will_ be forced to shoot you."

The man acted as though he heard nothing, he continued moaning, with his arms outstretched, and walked closer and closer to Susana.

A loud bang, and the man stumbled back as a bullet pierced the centre of his chest – only to continue walking a second later.

"That's – that's impossible. I hit his heart; he should be on the floor squirming in pain!" Susana started shaking. "You try it."

She shoved the gun into my hands. I took aim at the man's chest and pulled the trigger. I didn't anticipate the recoil as the gun hit my nose and the bullet flew straight between the man's eyes.

"Son of a-" I screamed in pain as my nose bled out, after which Susana took back the gun and shot the next two men in the head. "Damn it."

"Let me look," said Susana, putting the gun on the coffee table next to us. "This is going to hurt."

I let out a yell of pain as she put my nose back in its original place. "Oh, damn."

We stood there staring at the three bodies lying dead on my living room floor. "What do we say when the police show up?"

"The whole neighbourhood is going insane. The priest's blood is making them go crazy," said Susana, "with some sort of epidemic going on here I doubt three dead robbers is going to make them worry more than a disease that's making everybody want to eat everything. "

"Were you at the mass last night?" I asked, trying to remember if she was there.

"Yes, I saw the whole thing. Everybody was going crazy to suck on the priest's wound. The priest can go to hell. He practically poisoned half the parish. Were you there?"

"Yes," I answered. "I didn't drink his blood!" I was cautious of the fact that she knew how to use my gun better than I did.

"I know," she said, smirking a little at my reactions. "If you drank his blood you'd be like one of them by now." She motioned to the three dead bodies lying on the floor.

"What do we do about those bodies, by the way?"

"Haul them outside, then," she said, picking up the gun and looking out the door.

"Because I'm a guy I have to do it?" I protested. Why was I being so neurotic about hauling three dead bodies that were littering my formerly immaculate living room floor?

"Yes, actually," she answered as she held out the gun in her hands, "unless you think you're better with a gun?"

"Hey, I killed the first one!" Why? Why did I have to argue?

"By accident!"

I just didn't argue after that. She was right, she was better with a gun, but no way was I going to acknowledge it. Even at that time, even in a country with a culture of empowered women like the Philippines, I still thought pride counted for something. I told her to keep watch as I dragged the first body – the one with the knife sticking out of its chest – out into my also formerly spotless lawn.

"Do you think this is happening everywhere else?" she asked as I went back inside to get the second body.

"I doubt all of the priests had blood that made you go crazy," I answered, exhausted after hauling out the second body.

"Do you exercise?" she asked, I don't know whether she was genuinely curious or she just wanted to fill the silences.

"Not a lot," I answered, dragging the third body by its pudgy arms. "Just enough so I don't look like this guy," I motioned at the man I was dragging, who was wearing a tank top that exposed his round belly.

There was nothing moving in the street. Two high walls surrounding the sides of my house obstructed my view of anything else. One of the few good things about living in one of these gated communities is that nobody trusts anybody. Apparently my house is the only house whose front yard doesn't have a gate, or whose house doesn't have high, concrete walls protecting it from its neighbours.

"So what is this?" I asked. Susana's puzzled look told me that I had to elaborate further. "What kind of disease is this, exactly?"

"Did you ever read Max Brooks or watch a Romero film?" Susana asked. She was on the right track, though I myself at first would think that she was insane for suggesting it.

"What? You're thinking they're zombies?"

"I know it's hard to believe-"

"Because that's fiction," I retorted. I always considered myself to be a rational man; therefore at the beginning it was hard for me to believe that they were zombies. Of course, they weren't, but modern, thinking is yet to find a word more suitable to call them by other than zombies.

"Unless you've got a better explanation, I'm sticking with zombies." It was a waste of time to attempt to argue. We both agreed that we might not be able to defend ourselves if more "zombies" show up, and seeing as how the situation seemed to be worsening, we thought it best to just load my car with food and water and just find the house that looks the easiest to shield ourselves in and just wait it out.

That was as far ahead as we thought. I didn't know if we were thinking that it would be just us, but the discussion of what to do if we saw other people never came up.`

When faced with the ridiculous, right-minded people would contradict the ridiculous. They would use all in their power to prove that the ridiculous did not exist. This time, however, the ridiculous did exist. If Romero is still alive, what the hell was he thinking?


	3. Familiarity

Different things make a person feel safe. A little boy feels safe in the embrace of his mother. An alcoholic feels safe in his drunken stupor. A soldier feels safe under the metal of his helmet. It's not so much the feeling of being safe, but rather the feeling of being in something familiar. When the alcoholic tasted alcohol for the first time, what was to say he liked it at first? No, he came to recognize the feeling of being drunk over time; the turning point is when he spent more time being influenced by the drink than by other things, thus being drunk became familiar, and not being drunk began to feel strange.

Familiarity, that's how we decided on staying in our neighbourhood. Other than that, by all statistical evidences it was safe. There were less than 500 people living here, it had only one entrance: a big, strong gate with guard posts (though I doubt we thought about manning those guard posts). Most of the people weren't at home due to work. It was secluded, it was safe.

We were able to find a place to stay: a nice big mansion with huge gates and high concrete walls. It had a spacious front lawn and enough rooms to be able to store enough supplies to feed a small army.

Susana knew immediately that the house had been vacated. She had to explain why.

"The garage fits two cars yet there's only one car. The clothes are gone and the pictures have been taken." She pointed out the fact that there were nails hammered onto the wall, and yet there were no picture frames hanging there.

"Pictures?" I asked.

"Yes, pictures. When a robber comes to your house they take your clothes, the TV, the computer and the nice couch. All they leave behind are the pictures because it has no real value. Pictures are worth a lot emotionally and nothing else."

We spent the whole day setting ourselves up in that house. I padlocked the gate with huge metal chains and an equally huge – almost comical – padlock I found in the garage that had this key which was nearly as heavy as my gun. Susana set up the supplies in the kitchen and took some clothes from the master bedroom for herself. After making sure there was no other way to get into the house, we started covering the windows to make sure no light got out. We plastered it with newspapers, boarded it up with two-by-fours and any means of making sure no light from inside the house got outside. Just in case the electricity went out we were able to find an old generator in the storage shed at the back of the house.

If you've used a generator to produce electricity before, then you'll know that generators tend to produce a hell of a lot of noise. Their eyesight can be deceived, their sense of smell can mislead them, but you cannot cheat them out of their sense of hearing.

It's been well established that being turned into one of them leaves you with nothing but your primal instincts. Their sense of sight detects movement, if they see the trees swaying to the wind; they will go after the trees. Their sense of smell detects anything that doesn't smell like death. Their sense of hearing makes them go after the sound of the wind. When you're making a lot of noise with a diesel engine generator, they are going to come after you.

We spent a week soundproofing the storage shed. It was already partly underground, which was helpful, but it was still going to generate a fair amount of noise. Susana remembered something she saw as a kid.

"I took violin lessons when I was a kid," Susana said as we stood in the shed contemplating on how to keep the noise inside. "It was a small place in the middle of a mall; there were only three rooms where you could practice in. They were all soundproofed with those paper egg cartons. Every inch of the room was covered. I once saw a kid in there banging wildly with drums and I wasn't able to hear anything until I was inches away from the door."

So that's what we did. Luckily for us, the rest of the neighbourhood seemed to be vacated. We were cautious; we didn't dare venture outside the gated community (the idea of closing the gates of the gated community didn't occur to us). We went from house to house, gathering supplies and looking for egg cartons. More than once we saw one of them, and more than once Susana was the one who took care of it.

"It's weird how many eggs people eat," I remarked as she was layering the storage shed with the egg cartons. She insisted that she be the one who soundproofs the room, as she was the one who's actually seen a room that's been soundproofed this way.

When she was finished she shoved me out of the shed, closed the door and started screaming – or at least I think she was screaming, I didn't hear it – inside the shed, which proved that the soundproofing was effective.

We basically agreed on a few things about what was happening (a lot of them based on reading fiction and watching films): (1) if a person was bitten, that person turns into one of them. (2) They can only be killed by shooting the head. (3) There is probably no cure.

That was as far ahead as we thought. We haven't seen a lot of them. We were living in a large gated community whose people would usually be at work during the day. We were able to find a dusty Glock in one of the rooms of the mansion – as well as "borrowing" a shotgun and a tiny .38 calibre revolver from the guard station nearby, along with being able to find boxes of ammunition. We didn't know what to do with them, I most of all wasn't very well versed in using firearms. Susana, however, seemed to be an expert. In our spare time if she wasn't reading a book from the vast personal library at the mansion, she was dismantling the guns. Why, I don't know. I assumed it was to clean them or inspect them or something.

We were able to siphon gasoline from the nearby cars and other generators in the other houses – you'd be surprised how many upper-class houses have working generators (blackouts aren't unheard of, even for luxurious neighbourhoods) – and from gas tanks they use for cooking. We didn't use the generator much, it was mostly for light at night, which was good as we used most of the gasoline for the cars (we had two cars) when we went around gathering supplies in the neighbourhood.

We still didn't dare go outside the gates. We were safe here, even if it was just the two of us. The walls surrounding the neighbourhood made us feel protected. Yes, we'd see one of them on occasion, but it wasn't something we couldn't handle, even though we didn't figure into the fact that shooting a gun attracted them.

Outside the gates seemed like a different story. We saw more and more of them walking around outside the gates. Luckily, they weren't smart enough to figure out that there were living beings inside the walls. We wanted to keep it that way.

Another week passed. We heard nothing of the outside world, and more and more of them were gathering outside the neighbourhood (the mansion we were staying in was at least three stories high that we were able to see outside the walls). A few days previously we saw a car streaking past the gate, running down anything in its way. It must have been reinforced somehow, like those buses in one of the zombie films I watched before everything went to hell. I'd always thought they were only real in movies and books. Human ingenuity must thrive when the world is going insane.

Our days were now controlled by routine. In the morning we would eat and then take the car out and then scavenge for supplies until sometime in the afternoon. Then we would rest for a few hours and then eat dinner (we only ate twice a day to save our supplies). They were disappearing. Susana's guess was that something was drawing them away, but we were still not anxious enough to venture outside the gates.

The only thing that made our routine different was the one week we spent burying the bodies we found (we counted 316 bodies). I say the word "we" loosely, as most of what Susana was doing was watching around with the shotgun.

It was a month since we've seen the last one up close. We could still see them gathering over the horizon, by the direction of where the state university was – where Susana studied. Susana theorized that people were holding out there. Chances are that was true, but we still didn't want to take any chances.

The lack of things to do got me and Susana talking a lot more. It was something I was dreading – and avoiding. If we started talking, we would start to become emotional. If we become emotional we become attached. Being emotional makes you act irrationally. Being attached just makes you stupid. It must be good that it's only us; if there were more of us it would have complicated things and it would have forced me to act irrationally a lot more. Luckily for me, it's just Susana.

What do you do, when you live in a large neighbourhood that contains only two living people? You can familiarize yourself with every inch of that neighbourhood, you can read every book but in the end you will need to familiarize yourself with something that is constantly changing: a person. There's only one other person in that neighbourhood besides you, which doesn't leave much room for choices.

That person becomes more familiar to you than every inch of that neighbourhood. That person – in my case, she – becomes more familiar to you than the thousands of pages from the hundreds of books you've read twenty times each.

I was becoming attached to Susana. For all I know, I needed her more than she needed me. Romance never entered my mind, but it was starting to become an option.


	4. Attachment

My parents were on a flight from Manila to Los Angeles. They went to Los Angeles a few times a year for business, it was nothing new. By this time I was living in a dorm inside my university. It was March, school was almost over and therefore I braced myself for three months with my parents at home when I saw the news on the TV. A lunatic in a huge truck drove in front of the plane, causing a crash and a huge explosion. A lot of people walked out of the plane unharmed, some walked out with injuries. Some, like my parents, didn't survive.

Inheritance. That's how I became a millionaire at 20. Even through emotional turmoil and the thought that I don't need to work another day of my life, I still finished my studies. Two years later, I graduated at 22 with a pre-law degree and ready to go back to school to continue my studies. Circumstances led to me halting my education, and being in a situation where all I'm left to do is write down my memoirs, clinging on to hope that someday someone would read this and that somehow somebody would understand what happened to us.

I don't know how Susana and I ended up talking about what we were doing before the world ended, but a few weeks into staying at this luxurious mansion, we ended up being as emotional as humanity allows us to be.

We were at the patio, enjoying a breakfast of two cans of corned beef on stylish bamboo furniture when we got to talking. First it was the usual talk we would have. What we think is happening, what we think is going on outside the walls, how long we think our supplies are going to last before we have to go outside. I don't remember how the conversation ended up with me talking about how my parents died. I'd like to believe Susana simply asked me about it, but she's not exactly the one to ask about other people's pasts, and I'm not exactly one for sharing things about my personal life.

"A millionaire at 20," Susana remarked, even though I'm sure her parents have a will that assures her future as well. "Why did you still want to study? You could have taken your parents' company and you'd be richer than you are now."

"I never had a stomach for business and all that. I was going to be a lawyer, you know. I just finished my pre-law this March," I explained. "What's your story?"

"I'm a sophomore. Architecture. My father hasn't come home in weeks, so I'm assuming the worst," she explained. If she was grieving, she didn't show it. Her face was always expressionless, even during the few times we were under pressure.

"Where's the rest of your family?"

"I have three siblings. I'm the third child. My older brother and sister are in Canada with my French-Canadian mother." Even though her face was expressionless I couldn't help but notice something in her voice.

"What about your other sibling?"

"She studies at…" Susana stopped. She looked away from me. I found it, that something in her voice. It was something close to sadness. "I should have gone out. I should have looked for her. We go to the same university."

She wasn't crying. Her face was still inexpressive. I was wrong, that something in her voice wasn't sadness: it was guilt. Her voice wasn't even trembling. She'd already forgotten about going after her father, and now she's forgotten about going after a sister who was within distance of us.

"What's she studying?" I asked as thoughts of bravely rescuing her sister now flowing through my mind.

"Architecture, like me, we were going to start our own firm."

"Maybe we should talk about something else?" I asked, trying to make her feel better.

"Yeah, okay," she said, clearing her throat. "You ever have a relationship?"

"Yes," I had been dreading that question, but I wanted to be nice. It wasn't like we were going back to talking about her family.

"How long did it last?"

"Four years." I kept my answers short and discreet. Susana wasn't going to find out anything she didn't ask, even though I'm sure she's going to ask everything I'm dreading of answering.

"Why did it end?"

I went quiet. I didn't want to answer it, but it seemed like telling the truth was the only way to get her mind off her guilt.

"She died." Her eyebrows were raised, she went silent. I finally got to see what her face would look like when she was shocked. I gave her a small smile as I cleaned up the plates. It was a good thing the water was still running even though when we drank we always added some chlorine just in case (we had a lot of chlorine).

I didn't see her until sometime in the afternoon. I took a nap, so I assumed she went out for our daily patrol to look for supplies. We were in the garage. We always kept the garage door open (the chances of car theft at this time are very low) for easy access.

Then I got to thinking. I went back to seeing that car a few weeks ago and about how it was able to run through them without any problem. Maybe we could do what Romero did in _Dawn of the Dead_. Hopefully it won't just run over them, with any luck it would also keep them out and keep me and Susana safe inside.

"You want to try something?" I asked Susana.

"Try what?"

It should be easy to turn the car into a bulldozer. There were literally hundreds of cars littered around the neighbourhood, most of them are already empty of gas because we've siphoned it all off. It would be easy to turn the cars into spare parts for the "bulldozer" I'm going to build. Yeah, I decided to call it a bulldozer.

I was definitely getting attached to Susana. All chances point to the fact that her sister was dead and that if we went over there to try and rescue her, we would be killed ourselves. But emotion makes a person act irrationally. It's why I don't like getting attached. The one time I got attached to another person, she died – my parents died soon after. I know it's illogical to think that I'm the cause of their deaths, but it shouldn't be a coincidence that I'm the only person remaining in my family. No aunts or uncles, no cousins, no significant other. Then, Susana came along and it changed everything.


	5. Driving a Bulldozer

What forces people to drive for self-sacrifice? What makes people risk their neck with no hope? Do they do it for the greater good of the state? Do they do it because of religious belief? Do they do it in the hopes that someone else won't have to do it? Do they do it for their family's safety?

Or maybe there are some people who just want to do it for the sake of doing it? People who truly are altruistic like that, even though all evidences would suggest that a truly altruistic person doesn't exist.

Driving through thousands of them just to save a person who might be dead for the sake of another, does that count as a truly altruistic gesture? Would there be an ulterior motive? Is Susana's happiness a motive, or is it the reason I'm being this altruistic? Risking my life for the life of another person who we weren't even sure was alive. You never see charity like that anymore.

"Are you ready?" I asked Susana, who put on her seatbelt as I revved up the engine.

"Do it," she said.

I drove out of the open gates and into the road. There weren't a lot of them, though we did catch their attention now that there was a huge roaring machine in front of them. We spent a week building this car. It was like we dropped a metallic cage onto the car. We added a ramp-like extension to the bumper, which pretty much pushed aside everything in our way. It didn't always kill them, but it cleared our path easily enough. The rear bumper had the same extension, which made the car pretty much similar to a bulldozer. Man, I'd love to find an actual bulldozer to see which looks more badass.

"I don't exactly know the way to the university," I shouted as Susana screamed as one of them bounced off the windshield. "The Bulldozer works! Haha!" I have no idea why I was smiling that moment. I always had the habit of smiling when under pressure or under circumstances when smiling was inappropriate. I don't know if it was me or the fact that Filipinos, in general, were very happy-go-lucky.

"Keep going until you see the highway!" Susana shouted, as the sound of the car drowned out a lot of anything else that I was supposed to be hearing – except for my heartbeat, which I could _definitely_ hear. "Just pray the highway isn't blocked; it's the only route I know to the university."

"Shit," I remarked. I stopped the Bulldozer. We've been driving for a few blocks. The highway lay in front of us, cars blocked almost every inch of the southbound lane.

"Look over there!" Susana pointed to the northbound lane. "There's practically no traffic on the other side. Drive, quick! They're all around us!" It was stupid of me to stop the Bulldozer. They really were all over us.

It made me realize the one flaw in the Bulldozer. I didn't put ramps for the sides. I could have simply attached them to the doors. They were banging on the metal bars. Susana looked freaked. I reversed the car, practically taking off some of their feet.

I don't recall much of what happened next. I remember seeing a McDonalds next to a school, but other than that everything seems to be blurred until we were able to drive up to the northbound lane.

Something seemed different about it. On our right was another university (The state university was also in the area), which gave the feeling of normality. The feeling was shared by Susana, who couldn't stop staring at the university as the speed gauge went up to 65.

"Stop the car. Stop the car!" Susana yelled. The screech of the tires because of the sudden brake of the car made me lightly hit my head on the steering wheel. "Look." She was pointing at the university.

We didn't see people; we didn't even see signs that people used to be there. That's what looked different. The university was _clean_. The trees were tall and proud as they always were; the streets inside the university were almost spotless; the grass was trimmed and the flowers were blooming. It was as though somebody had been taking care to make sure that the university continually looked pristine.

"Somebody's alive in there," Susana said. I was sure we were thinking the same thing: maybe her sister was in there, somewhere. The only problem is looking for people there, seeing if they would let us inside.

We didn't have time to think about it, as more and more of them were approaching the Bulldozer from the southbound lane.

"Freaking _zombies_," I exclaimed as I hit the gas and drove away from the university. I swear I saw somebody _running_ inside the university.

They were coming in in flocks from the southbound lane. The metallic fences separating the two lanes were clanging loudly, so loud that Susana and I were sure that this would attract even more of them.

We kept driving, passing another college and another school (those definitely looked like they were devoid of life) along the way until we reached a pile of cars on the highway, blocking everything from getting to the other side. "Over there," Susana said, pointing to our left. It was the entrance to the state university, everything inside was burning. Smoke was rising from everywhere; embers from the fires were rising into the air.

"How the hell didn't we notice that the whole place was burning?" I asked in shock, as it was apparent that the trail of smoke rising into the air could be seen for miles all around. Then I remembered how a couple of mall giants had, a few years ago, decided to build luxuriously tall buildings within the vicinity of the state university, which could explain how the smoke rising from the state university wouldn't be seen from our neighbourhood.

They were everywhere, still shambling around even though parts of their body were burning. I looked at Susana. She was, again, expressionless. "Should we go?"

"No," Susana said, defiant to the end. "Drive around inside. The gate's not locked, bump into it a little and it'll open." I followed orders even though everything going on around us told me to drive the Bulldozer back to our mansion.

I took a left at the next intersection and slowed down the Bulldozer to a twenty on the gauge. Pushing open the gates into the state university, both our jaws dropped at the sight.

Everything – literally everything – was burning. They were walking around, some of them were on fire, others were already burnt to crisp and yet they were still walking around as though nothing was happening; the roar of the blaze all around us masked the sound of the car. Most of them seemed to have had most of their face burned off, which meant they didn't see us, the smell of burned flesh, among other things, was masking any scent we may have had (Susana took a bath prior to this and I could remember her hair smelling like lavender) and the roaring fire was masking the noise from our car. We were practically invisible.

The buildings were billowing smoke. Even though our windows were shut tight the smoke was still coming in. Susana took my hand, squeezing it tight. Her face spelled horror at what was in front of us.

A whole horde of them, walking in all different directions, all of them burning; the smell of their seared skin was reaching our car.

"Over there," I told her, gesturing to our left, to a recessed field which was left unburned except for the occasional ember that landed on it. There were people running across it. They were people, we were sure of it. There were around twelve of them, all of them carrying bulky backpacks and wearing different kinds of masks to cover their faces. Two of them were holding pistols and another one was holding what looked like a spear of some kind (yes, a spear, a rod with a pointy end), it could have just been a long stick with a knife taped to the end of it.

"Wait," Susana said as I was about to drive up to them. "It might not be her, they might just be looters. Let's just follow them, see where they're headed." It was easy enough not to be spotted; the smoke obscured us from view and yet allowed us to keep a glimpse of them trailing their way out of the university through a different gate (a gate we apparently missed on our way inside).

We followed them out of the university and into the highway. When we reached the highway they were able to figure out that we were following them, but the smoke had already drifted into the highway. They were able to run off with the cover of the smoke.

I sped up the car a little, but they were out of sight. Looking at the university we passed by (the clean one), I can swear I saw people _running_ in there.

"They're in the university," Susana said, "I'm sure of it." A small smile passed her face for a second, before disappearing in her emotionless façade. "We can go back now."

And so we did. I drove away from the university with Susana being assured that there was _somebody_ living in there. I guess that's all she needed: hope, the hope that her sister was still alive. If we went into the university and found out the truth about her sister, the risk would have been too much, should she find out whatever truth was waiting for her.

The smoke had reached our mansion, but closing the windows and doors was able to keep it outside. The smoke also helped keep us invisible, hopefully they weren't able to follow us.

Susana smiled. It's one of the very few emotions I was able to get from her. That was enough for me. No, I wasn't altruistic. I did it for the good feeling that _I_ would get when I see her smile. That wasn't altruism. That was me being selfish, because I did it because I wanted something out of it, even if all I wanted out of it was just a smile. That was enough for me.


	6. Intruders

What survives when everything else crumbles? Will cities be reclaimed by nature? Will our pictures, our films, our recordings, will they deteriorate over time and leave the future with no evidence that we were ever here? People decay, metal deteriorates, memories fade. So if this really is our end, how will the world remember that we were ever here? If they win, if in the end we're all turned into them, and then our bodies decompose over time; how will the world remember that there was some good in this world? How will these writings of mine survive over time?

How do we leave our mark on the world when it will eventually be forgotten? Will there be an equally mythical being out there, ready to determine what is worth preserving? If there is a God, why doesn't He come down now, in our time of peril? Does He test us, to see if we are evolutionarily capable of adapting to our new environment? Or has He left us for a new, more perfect people that He has created, in some distant universe?

Or maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe He knows we'll adapt. It will be difficult, many will perish, but we'll survive. I used to watch something on TV, detailing how people sacrificed everything from money to a limb just to be able to survive. Maybe that's all we're dealing with.

If there is a God, is He toying with us or is He somehow helping us survive through this?

The fire at the state university lasted for days. The ashes flew everywhere, the smoke suffocated everything outside. For some reason, they had no need of lungs. We would see some of them with soot coming out of their mouths. We found one gas mask from the garage of one of the houses in the neighbourhoods (some guy whose principal hobby was pimping out their ride). This meant only one of us was able to go out of the house without breathing in the toxic air.

We are baffled by how it only took this long for the smoke to be able to reach us. We are even more baffled by how we weren't able to notice the fire when it started. When we got to the state university, the fire had obviously been going on for a while. We are satisfied with leaving it to the weather and to the fact that tall condo buildings obscured our view of the state university.

Susana was happy with staying inside. She didn't do much other than stare outside a window facing the university with the people in it. I kept telling her we could go there, but she insisted otherwise. "It's too risky," she would argue. "For all you know there are bad people in there. They could take the car, take our supplies. They could find the mansion and God knows what they might do to _me_."

She was right, of course. It wasn't worth the risk. We both knew that you had to be cautious about who you trusted. But even I was curious. The whole world was ending, why did those people at the university bother to keep the place clean? If the grass was green, if the trees were tall and if the flowers were blossoming, would that really help them survive?

As far as we knew, our supplies would be able to last us at least a year. Most of the houses in the neighbourhood have been cleared out, which meant that if we wanted to keep scavenging we'd have to go out of the neighbourhood, and we both decided that for the moment it wasn't worth the risk.

We both knew why she didn't want to go. Seeing those people run into that university gave her hope, finding out that her sister isn't one of those people in there would take all that hope away from her.

We were seeing more and more of "people". The mansion was really tall and we were able to see far and wide. It's usually groups of three or four, carrying bags, wearing masks and moving fast. I would only see them for a few seconds before they would disappear into another house, sometimes they would stop to kill one of them before running off completely. Susana and I knew it would only be a matter of time before they would come here to scavenge for supplies. We hadn't thought about preparing for what we would do should they come.

Two weeks passed and one night I heard somebody opening the door. Instinctively, I took the shotgun from the side of the bed (which I do every morning) and headed to the side of the door, where I would wait for them to come to me.

"Doesn't look like he stays here, the place isn't clean," said the voice of a man somewhere in the house, loud enough for me to hear.

"Yes because they care about cleanliness in a time like this," said a second voice, the voice of a woman.

"Well we keep everything clean, why can't we assume whoever would stay here also cleans up?" said the man.

"Because they aren't as uptight about the environment as we are," said the woman.

They were walking around downstairs. Weeks before, Susana had thought of keeping all our food and water at the top levels of the mansion for safety, which was a good idea as that meant the kitchen was cleaned out entirely.

"There's nothing here," said the woman, "it looks like somebody's already cleaned up the kitchen."

"Did you see the car? It looked like the car Paolo was talking about, like a car from one of those racing games where you could shoot rockets from the hood of your car."

"He also said whoever was driving it was insane," said the woman.

"That's why Sheila and Paolo are outside keeping watch. The padlock on the gate hasn't been touched for days, which makes me think that nobody's here. I'll go check upstairs."

I heard footsteps, which was where I remembered something important: Susana. She was always sleeping in a different room every day. This day it was somewhere in the third floor, which was lucky for me.

"Looks like bedrooms!" shouted the man, the voice coming from the hall, his footsteps getting louder and louder.

"Not so loud, moron!" the woman shouted from below.

"If those things were here, don't you think we would have heard or smelled something by now? We're pretty loud."

"That isn't what I'm worried about, idiot! And we wouldn't be able to smell them; the ash is clogging up everything. That's why we have gasmasks!"

The man didn't answer. I think he was able to assume what the woman was talking about: that someone else who is alive might be living in the mansion, and might be hostile. If he was thinking that, he was right. His footsteps became light; every time he would open a door I would hear a faint creaking sound. Either the man knew someone else was there or he was just being cautious. I'd like to think he was just being cautious, I hadn't moved or made a noise since I heard them entering. Maybe Susana was making noise, but she was in the floor above us, which would mean even I would have heard her.

He was getting closer to my room. I had positioned myself on the other side of the door. The only problem would be if he kicked in the door, which would mean I would act like a doorstopper and he would be aware of something on the other side of the door, which might raise an alarm. Hopefully, he won't do that, as he is still being cautious enough not to make any loud noises or sudden movements.

His hand gripped the doorknob, slowly turning it and opening the door by an inch. With his pistol raised, he took a step into the room. He took another step; his body is fully in the room. He took another step; his eyes started scouting out the darkness.

I took two steps toward him, raising the shotgun and pointing it at the back of his head. He was obedient, his hands rose along with his pistol, his trigger finger safely away from the trigger itself. He was right handed, and so was I. The shotgun was resting on my right shoulder and his pistol was on his right hand, which meant that if I made a move to take the pistol from him I would have been in a vulnerable position, thus risking my position of power.

"Throw it onto the bed," I ordered softly. He did as ordered, the pistol bouncing lightly and his right hand back in place in the air. "Where did you people come from?"

"The university," he answered. His tone was shaking. He was afraid.

"I have questions. You have answers. What happened to the state university?"

"They burned it down."

"Who's 'they'?"

"How the hell would I know? Those people in the state university or something."

Something cold was pushed up against the back of my head. My heart raced as fear gripped the shotgun in my hands.

"Drop the shotgun. Drop it!" ordered the voice of a woman as she pushed the barrel of the gun in her hand harder into my neck. "Drop it now!" I didn't drop it, the man I was holding up at gunpoint turned around and took the gun from me, after which he hit me with the butt of the gun. I felt a blinding pain, and then there was nothing.

Why did I become hostile towards them? Is a society in peril totally incapable of trusting other people? It would be safer to be cautious rather than open, as all chances would point to any stranger you meet stealing everything you own and leaving you for dead.

What legacy would we leave behind when in the time that we need every living being, we would gladly kill them and take everything they have for our own survival? If we continue to ignore the big picture, would we die out? If we can't trust anyone, what would make us different from them?

Is this a test of how much our humanity can take? If so, I'm not sure we're going to pass.


	7. Uneasy Introductions

How do people know that before somebody dies they see a white light? They're dying, right? They're not exactly in the position to be able to share their experience. Is the experience of almost dying the same with _actually_ dying? And when they say that their life flashes by their eyes when they see death staring at them, why did they say it was their whole life?

When I felt the cold barrel of the pistol on the back of my head I didn't see my childhood, I didn't see my high school life or when I was the only person to graduate from college without a relative accompanying me. I saw Susana. I saw her cropped hair and her sparkling hazel eyes and her smile that makes you drop dead. I remembered how I felt when I held her hand for the first time, I remember the way she talked to me as though we were the only two people left in the world (I was ready to believe that, considering everyone else was killing each other). I don't think you see your whole life, I think you see what's most important to you. To me it was Susana, because there was literally nobody else in my life.

I felt disoriented. Everything was bright and blurry. I felt something wrapped around my arms and legs, keeping me still. I felt like I was lying in a bed. My head was in pain and my limbs feel like they fell asleep.

"He's waking up," said a woman's voice. Was that Susana?

"Susana?" I asked. She was the only thing I was worrying about. "Susana? Susana?"

"I'm not Susana, dear," the woman's voice answered. The voice seemed familiar.

I was finally able to get a clear view of the room. It was small - it looked like the room of a dormitory. The bed I was tied to was on one side of the room, there was another bed on the other side. The room was empty aside from the beds. The woman was sitting on the other bed, looking at me.

She looked like she was around my age, she seemed masculine – and not just because she was holding my shotgun in her hand.

I tried pulling myself off the cuffs binding my hands and legs but to no avail. The woman got up from the bed and pointed the gun at me. "Calm down," she ordered, "you're safe."

"Safe my ass, you're pointing a shotgun at me - _my_ shotgun."

"You pointed it at my friend!" she shouted, putting down the gun.

"You broke into my house!" I shouted back.

"_Only_ because we were ringing on the gates for like an hour and nobody was answering. There was a huge padlock on the gates; we _assumed_ somebody was living in it. When nobody answered we thought otherwise."

I rattled off a string of very unfriendly words, all of which I don't see the point of sharing.

"Hon, you seriously have to calm down," she said. "You really are in a safe place."

"What place?" I was starting to get angry, but the way she talked to me seemed to have had an effect on me, as though she was able to persuade me to calm down just from her tone.

"The university." A man walked in from the open doorway. He was wearing a creased polo shirt with old jeans and soiled dress shoes. His face was bony and had a receding hairline. "Good morning, people call me Professor, like I'm one of the X-Men. I see you've been acquainting yourself with Joanne."

"He actually is a professor," Joanne explained, as though all past hostility disappeared. "Should I remove the cuffs?" The Professor nodded. She took them off, and it took a surprising amount of effort to fight the urge to throttle Joanne after she removed the cuffs.

"Welcome to the university," said the Professor. "Tell me something: a few weeks ago we saw a car drive through here, it was customized with bumpers that looked like they were made to take down barricades."

I was silent. I was still trying to assess how friendly they would be. They could have sent Joanne to my room precisely because her demeanour seemed the least hostile (_she_ was their least hostile?). The professor could easily be the most insane person in the university. I've read how psychopaths were feared for the fact that they could behave normally around other people (as compared to the less-feared people stricken with insanity).

"Where's Susana?" I asked, deflecting the question.

"Who?" asked the Professor.

"Susana, she was in the house with me."

The Professor had a look. I don't know how to describe it. He looked at Joanne, signalling for an answer.

"We didn't find anyone else in the house," answered Joanne, who gave the Professor the same look.

"Don't toy with me, Professor!" I said, nearly shouting. I was being furious. Susana wasn't one for hiding, they would have seen her. "Where are you hiding her?"

I stood up, rushed for the doorway. The Professor stood out of the way as I burst through the hallway. I was definitely in a dormitory. There were five other rooms in the floor, all of their doors closed.

"SUSANA! SUSANA!" I shouted, walking around the floor. It looked like there was nobody else in the floor with us. I opened a door; it was empty except for the beds. I opened another door, same thing.

"Joanne!" the Professor called, Joanne ran down the hallway and pinned me to the wall. She looked masculine but she didn't look that strong. Either that or I was weak.

She pushed my face into the wall, locking my arms in her grip. "Calm down, you asshole!" she ordered. Through the grip I was still shouting: "SUSANA! SUSANA WHERE ARE YOU?" She let go, and when I turned around she pinned me back against the wall, this time facing her.

"HEY," she shouted at me. "Calm. Down. Now." I have no idea why I suddenly became obedient, but I did do as ordered. I stopped shouting, but I was still furious. "Believe us when we say we did not find anyone else in that mansion."

"I want to go," I said. "I need to go back to the mansion right now."

"If you do that you will be walking," the Professor said in a calm manner from the doorway of the room I was in. "The ash from the fire is disappearing. Their sense of smell may be compromised, but believe me when I say they will be able to properly see and hear you. Do you think they won't follow you inside?"

"You brought them inside the neighbourhood?" I asked Joanne, her grip still strong on my arms. "Did you bring a car? "

I should explain why I asked this question. When driving back to our neighbourhood, Susana and I agreed that it wouldn't be safe to bring the car inside because it might lure them to us, so we found a house with a garage somewhere outside the gated community and hid the car there.

"Well, yeah we drove around the neighbourhood," answered Joanne. "All the other houses were empty, but then we went to your mansion and found a goldmine. We brought everything we could find here."

"You took everything?" I was a bit angry at the notion. They noticed it.

"Well of course, that food can feed us for a month," said Joanne, now looking a bit distressed.

"One month," said the Professor, coming closer to us, "take note of that. One month. When they reached us, a lot of people died. I had to kill my co-workers, my students, and you don't want to know who else. Before this happened the university had a population of nearly ten thousand, now there are a little over two hundred of us left alive. The rest are out there, looking for the next living being to eat.

"One month is our estimation. If every person takes one can of food a day, then your goldmine will only last us a month. One month is a long time to live, when death is literally right outside. Don't you want to feel the satisfaction of having been the reason that a hundred people were kept alive for a month?"

He was a good professor. He made me feel guilty about being angry at them for taking all of my supplies. I remember thinking that he must have been a lawyer of some kind to be able to argue this well. It didn't even look like we were arguing, I was never able to respond. I just nodded, and Joanne let me go.

"Let's show him the campus, Joanne," said the Professor, leading the way out of the building. Stepping outside was like stepping into Alice's Wonderland.

Everything looked like the world hadn't turned into hell. The buildings were newly painted, the grass was green, the flowers were blooming and the streets were free of litter.

"Welcome to the University," said the Professor.

Right now, I'm starting to think that people don't really see a white light. That everything they've said with what happens before you die – it's all fabricated. Though if I died and this was my white light, it was missing Susana.

I missed her, and now more than ever. I hoped to God that what I was feeling wasn't love or even any kind of infatuation. I hoped I missed her just for the sake of it, because if I became attached then things would go horribly wrong.

She was important to me, and I can bet I was important to her.


End file.
